1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording apparatus which performs recording by ejecting ink from recording means mounted on a carriage to a material to be recorded, particularly to the inkjet recording apparatus which is provided with a wiping means for wiping a nozzle surface of the recording means clean.
2. Related Background Art
In the inkjet recording apparatus, because the recording is performed by ejecting the ink from a micro nozzle toward the material to be recorded, the unnecessary ink is easy to adhere to the nozzle surface, and sometimes normal ink ejection is obstructed by the adhesion ink. Therefore, in the inkjet recording apparatus, a wiping means including a wiper blade for wiping the nozzle surface clean is provided, and the adhesion ink near the nozzle is wiped and removed in such a manner that the wiper blade and the nozzle surface are relatively moved while overlapped with each other.
A mode of the relative movement between the wiper blade and the nozzle surface includes the case in which a carriage mounting a recording head is moved with respect to the stationary wiper blade and the case in which the carriage mounting the recording head is caused to stand still to move the wiper blade in parallel with the carriage or to rotationally move the wiper blade. In most cases of the movement of the carriage, the movement of an extension of the recording movement of the carriage in a main scanning direction is utilized. In this case, the wiping is performed only when needed by taking the wiper blade in and out between an overlap position with respect to a moving path of the carriage (nozzle surface) and a retracting position. However, in the conventional configuration, it is necessary to sufficiently make a movable range of the carriage larger than a recording area, which leads to upsizing of the recording apparatus.
Recently, the nozzle surface of the recording head is often formed in a complicated concave and convex surface, so that it is harder than ever to sufficiently clean and remove dirt near the nozzle only by the wiping in the carriage movement direction in the use of the movement of the carriage. For the above-described reasons, the configuration in which the carriage is caused to stand still to move the wiper blade is often used. In the case of the movement of the wiper blade, the wiper blade is reciprocated by the parallel movement or by the rotational movement in the direction intersecting (for example, orthogonally) the direction of the main scanning movement for the recording. In this case, the carriage is stopped at a wiping position, and the wiper blade is driven to wipe the nozzle surface of the recording head clean.
However, in the above-described wiping means adopting the method of moving the wiper blade, in order to accurately wipe out a periphery of the nozzle of the recording head, it is required to stop the carriage mounting the recording head at the accurate position. Further, in order to prevent vibration during the movement of the carriage, recently a vibration dumping member is often attached between a motor used as a driving source of the carriage and the driven carriage. However, in the configuration in which the vibration dumping member is attached, due to elastic displacement in a driving mechanism, it becomes more difficult that the carriage is accurately stopped and the positioning of the carriage becomes more difficult and more inaccurate when the carriage is stopped.